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We've all graduated from the place called MSU, not Michigan State but rather, Making Stuff Up, in other words, we all talk to ourselves. We all are constantly talking to ourselves. Raise your hand if you think you talk to yourself. Now, those of you who aren't raising your hands are saying to yourself, do I talk to myself. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. But regardless of what the voices in your head are saying, I can tell you one thing – nothing that they are saying is necessarily true.

As a sales trainer, I see this from nearly all of my clients. Here's what happens. I meet with a sales person and I ask them when they feel the most stress. I get a lot of different answers – when money comes up, at the close, during prospecting, when someone asks me a question and I don't know the answer. And so I ask them the next logical question, when that happens what do you do? And they typically tell me about sales situations that end badly. In fact, they can often present to me a litany of failures resulting from the specific weakness they have described.

A System?

Matt Nettleton

When someone says to you, “Don’t worry – I have a system,” you may roll your eyes and get ready for disaster. After all, systems are for betting on horses or getting around rules, right? Wrong – a system is an orderly measurable repeatable arrangement of elements that lead to success. As a manager you can only manage sales people if you have a selling system and it is the same selling system that your salespeople are using.

Sometimes it’s not enough to say you’re following a system when you sell. The right system is important, and your current system may have some beneficial elements, but you just can’t seem to reach the level to which you aspire. And you may not follow the same processes every time, on every call, so your “system” becomes a reactive experience that is controlled by your prospect.

The End

Matt Nettleton

As a salesperson, I seem to take quite a few lessons from movies and some of the best lessons are in some of the worst movies. Most people think Burt Reynolds played only tough guy roles and the occasional slapstick comedy. But one of the best sales lessons I have ever learned was from the movie 'The End'. If you have not seen 'The End' do not rush out to rent it. I am about to spoil the plot for you. This is kind of a cute movie starring Dom DeLuise and Burt Reynolds. The plotline is simple – Burt Reynolds spends the entire movie trying to commit suicide and cannot do it successfully.

At the end of the movie, he finds himself swimming out, seemingly, to the middle of the ocean. He's going to drown himself. As he's in the middle of the ocean, starting to believe he's going to drown, he realizes he doesn't want to kill himself, so he says, "Dear God, please save me, save me. I don't want to die. If you save me, I'll give you everything, 100%, everything that I own. Save me!"